User blog:Alenxa/What are the chances: Calculating drop rates
If you've been to my user page, you may have noticed talk of figuring out drop rates for loot and other bonus items. I've been working on it by myself for a while, and I'm happy to say that I'm now ready to open the project to volunteers. What's a drop rate? "Drop rate" is the term for how likely it is that a game action will get you an item that doesn't always result from that action. For example, tree saplings, worms, crickets, seaweed, and butterfly chitin all have their own drop rate. So do loot items that drop from monsters. And with enough data, we can figure out approximately what those drop rates are. How do you do that? The basic information you need to calculate a drop rate is the number of times you try to get a loot item in a certain situation and the number of times you actually get it. Divide the successes by the total tries, express it as a percent, and voila: a drop rate. For example, if you pick 100 wild grass, you'll probably get between 50 and 60 crickets--a drop rate of 50-60%. But not everything is so easy to measure, mainly because not everything is so easy to try for. And then there's luck, which has a greater effect as it increases. This is where volunteers come in: to divide and conquer the huge number of ways we can get loot, and to speed up the process so we can get--and publish--solid numbers sooner. What I've done is to set up a spreadsheet on Google Docs with sections for recording what's being picked, trapped, and harvested, how many times, and how much extra stuff comes from it. There are other bits of information that it also asks for because I'm not certain what impact they have on the overall rate: not just luck, but also player level and whether a resource is being harvested at home or in the wild. Some of the sections are set up to auto-calculate, so you can see drop rates in real time. Eventually, all the rates will be controlled for variables and averaged/calculated in another tab, but first we need to see what the variables are doing to them. This sounds hard. It's less hard than involved. I'll be doing the spreadsheet-fu and any necessary stats math, if that's what you're worried about. The main thing to remember, if you want to join in, is that you'll need to decide what you want to record, and then put down what you picked, trapped, etc. even if you didn't get any loot from it. If we only remember to add information when we get good results, the result won't be right. Not to say that you need to enter every single thing you do every time you play, because even I don't try to do that; but do your best not to cherry-pick your numbers. Even if you're picking cherries. Actually, it could be hard if you want to reset your luck...hard to not play for a day. Don't the rates change? Yes. In other games I've played, the devs have often made drastic changes in drop rates with the introduction of new quests. I don't anticipate this happening to such a degree here, mainly because we don't really have timed quests and our devs are reasonable. However, the supply chains for crafting in HBM are pretty complex, and some low-level monsters may have their loot drops tweaked to balance high-level trapping or crafting introduced in future updates. Therefore, any time there are batches of new items or monsters introduced, we will be restarting calculations. The current plan is to make a solid line of blacked-out cells across the sheet at the point where the update is noticeably live, freeze the data in the cells above it, and start over below. If it gets too awkward, I'll switch to archiving the sheets and putting up new ones. What about new monsters/resources? I'd like to ask that everyone on the project wait one week from a new release to start tracking drop rates for any new monsters or resources that are introduced. This will let the devs do some tinkering in case it's turning out to be too hard or too easy to get something. You don't have a sheet for (thing)/You don't control for (thing). For now, maybe. That doesn't mean I won't add it later. If it looks like a specific type of drop is being affected by something we're not recording, let me know. I may even be working on it already. OK, I'm sold. How do I get in on this? I'll need your email address in order to give you access to the spreadsheet. You can give it to me in wiki chat or send me a follow request on Twitter. I'll be setting chat "office hours" of 4-6 pm Pacific time (currently daylight time) on weekdays for this and for questions, and will try to be available at other times as I can manage it. I may have to change the hours on Tuesdays as early as next month; I'll let folks know when that happens and what I'm changing them to. And if it turns out y'all can't make it then and would like to talk in real time, I can try to find a better slot. Questions? Answers? Think I'm crazy? Let me know! Category:Blog posts